The first time Rajesh Kulkarni delivered to Flat 1408 in the Moonlight Towers, it was 3:07 AM on a Tuesday that smelled like diesel fumes and disappointment. Mumbai never really slept, but at this hour it dozed fitfully, tossing and turning in its bed of concrete and corrugated metal. The order on his QuickBite app was simple enough to make him look twice: plain white rice, one portion. Extra salt on the side.
No curry. No dal. No pickle. Just rice and salt.
The payment had already gone through—always a good sign—and the tip was generous enough to make the fifteen-minute ride from the restaurant worth it. Rajesh revved his Honda Shine, the motorcycle coughing like an old man with too many beedis under his belt, and navigated the empty streets where stray dogs ruled like four-legged kings.
Moonlight Towers squatted on the edge of Andheri East like a tumor that the city kept meaning to have removed but never quite got around to. Twenty floors of peeling paint and broken dreams, the kind of place where the elevator worked maybe three days out of seven if you were lucky. Tonight wasn't one of those lucky nights.
Rajesh climbed fourteen floors with the takeaway bag clutched in one hand, his QuickBite jacket soaked through with sweat despite the December chill. By the time he reached 1408, his legs were screaming rebellion and his chest felt like someone had poured hot chai directly into his lungs.
The door was already open. Not wide open, just cracked enough to show a sliver of darkness that seemed thicker than it should be, like looking into a mouth that had too many teeth.
"Delivery from QuickBite," Rajesh called out, his voice cracking slightly. He cleared his throat. "Order for M. Chakraborty?"
A hand emerged from the darkness. Just a hand, pale as funeral flowers, sliding out with a folded piece of paper between its fingers. The hand was feminine, delicate, but something about it made Rajesh's skin crawl the way it did when his mother told him stories about churails when he was young.
He took the paper and left the bag on the floor. The hand retreated. The door clicked shut.
It wasn't until he was back on his bike that Rajesh unfolded the note. Under the dim streetlight, he could barely make out the words written in careful English:
*Tomorrow. 4:47 PM. Corner of Hill Road and 16th. Blue Maruti. Don't let the child cross.*
Rajesh stuffed the note in his pocket and forgot about it. Customers in Mumbai were weird. This was a fact of life, like monsoons and traffic jams. He had six more deliveries before his shift ended, and his mother would be waking up soon, expecting the fresh pav he always brought home.
But the next day, as he was heading to start his evening shift, he passed the corner of Hill Road and 16th. The digital clock on the HDFC bank read 4:46. Some impulse—maybe curiosity, maybe the memory of that pale hand—made him slow down and watch.
4:47.
A blue Maruti Swift came tearing around the corner, driver on his phone, doing at least sixty in a thirty zone. At the same moment, a child, maybe six years old, broke free from his mother's hand, chasing a red ball that bounced into the street.
Rajesh didn't think. His hand shot out, grabbed the kid's collar, yanked him back. The Maruti screamed past, horn blaring, missing them by inches. The child's mother was screaming. The child was crying. Rajesh's heart was trying to escape through his throat.
He looked at the crumpled note in his pocket, then at the child now safe in his mother's arms.
What the hell had just happened?
---
The second delivery came exactly one week later. Same time: 3 AM. Same order: plain rice and salt. This time, Rajesh climbed those fourteen floors with something more than exhaustion weighing him down. The door was cracked again, same sliver of unnatural darkness. The hand emerged, same pale fingers, but this time he noticed the nails were bitten down to the quick, dried blood at the edges.
The note read: *December 18. Marine Drive. 11:20 PM. The man in the yellow shirt. He has a knife. She's only seventeen.*
Rajesh wanted to say something, wanted to demand answers, but the door had already shut. He stood in the hallway, note trembling in his hand, and wondered if he was losing his mind or if the world was.
December 18 was three days away.
He tried to forget. Tried to tell himself it was coincidence, that the thing with the child had been luck, nothing more. But the date circled his thoughts like a hungry dog. He found himself on Marine Drive that night, telling himself he was just taking a ride, clearing his head. The sea air would do him good.
11:18. He parked his bike, walked along the promenade where couples sat on the sea wall, legs dangling over the Arabian Sea.
11:19. He saw him—a man in a yellow shirt, walking with purpose, hand in his pocket. Following a girl in a college uniform who was checking her phone, oblivious.
11:20. The man quickened his pace. Rajesh moved without thinking, shouldered past the man hard enough to send him stumbling. The knife clattered on the pavement—a switchblade, ugly and efficient. People screamed. Someone called the police. The girl turned, saw the knife, and her face went white as paper.
The man in the yellow shirt ran. Rajesh let him go. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold his phone to call the police.
That night, he couldn't sleep. He lay on his thin mattress, staring at the ceiling fan that wobbled like a drunk uncle at a wedding, and wondered what he'd gotten himself into. His mother, sleeping in the next room, snored peacefully, unaware that her son had possibly saved two lives in a week. Or had he? Maybe he was going crazy. Maybe the notes were making him see danger everywhere.
But he knew they weren't. He knew it the way he knew his father wasn't coming back from that factory accident ten years ago, the way he knew his engineering degree was worthless in a city that had too many engineers and not enough jobs. Some truths sat in your gut like stones.
---
"You look like shit," Vikram said, sliding his helmet off and lighting a cigarette. They were parked outside a McDonald's, waiting for orders, the familiar ritual of delivery drivers everywhere. "What's wrong with you?"
Rajesh wanted to tell him. Wanted to spill everything about the mysterious customer and the notes and the lives he'd maybe saved. But how could he? Vikram would think he'd lost it, maybe report him to QuickBite management. He needed this job.
"Just tired," he said instead.
"It's that weird customer, isn't it?" Vikram grinned, showing teeth stained yellow from years of cigarettes and cutting chai. "The one who orders rice at 3 AM?"
"You know about that?"
"Everyone knows about Flat 1408, man. The other drivers, they won't take orders from there anymore. They say it's haunted. Some churail or something." He took a long drag. "But you keep going back."
"The tip is good."
"The tip is good," Vikram repeated, laughing. "Rajesh, my friend, some money isn't worth it. You know what happened to the last guy who delivered there regularly?"
Rajesh's stomach clenched. "What?"
"Pramod. You didn't know him, before your time. He started getting those orders, same as you. Middle of the night, weird requests. Then one day, he just stopped showing up. They found him a week later, sitting in his room, not talking, not eating, just staring at the wall. His mother said he kept mumbling about things that hadn't happened yet."
The app pinged. Order waiting.
Vikram stubbed out his cigarette. "Just be careful, okay? Mumbai's full of strange things, but some strange things are better left alone."
---
The third note came two weeks later, and this time it was different. The order was the same, the climb was the same, but when the door cracked open, Rajesh could smell something besides the usual mustiness. Perfume, expensive and floral, but underneath it, something sour. Fear-sweat. The kind that comes from being afraid for so long that your body starts to eat itself.
The hand that emerged was shaking. The note was damp with perspiration.
*They know I'm telling you. Building fire. January 2. New Paradise Complex. 2:30 AM. Thirty-seven people will die unless someone pulls the fire alarm at 2:15. The security guard will be asleep. Kitchen fire, third floor, spreads through bad wiring.*
This time, Rajesh didn't stay silent. "Who are you? What is this?"
The hand retreated slightly, then returned with another piece of paper. This one had just two words: *Please help.*
"I can call the police. Whatever's happening to you—"
The door slammed shut. From inside, he heard a sound that might have been crying or might have been laughter. In the dark hallway of Moonlight Towers, it was hard to tell the difference.
January 2 was tomorrow.
That night, Rajesh told his mother he was sick. She felt his forehead, made him drink a glass of hot milk with turmeric, and fussed over him the way she had when he was eight and afraid of the dark. He wanted to tell her everything, wanted her to make it better the way she always had, but this was beyond her ability to fix with warm milk and gentle words.
At 2 AM, he was standing outside the New Paradise Complex, a housing society in Goregaon that housed maybe two hundred families. The security guard was indeed asleep, head thrown back in his plastic chair, snoring loud enough to wake the dead but not himself.
2:10. Rajesh's phone felt like it weighed a thousand kilos.
2:12. He could smell smoke. Faint, but there. Or was he imagining it?
2:14. Definitely smoke now, wisping out from a third-floor window.
2:15. He pulled the fire alarm.
The building erupted in chaos. Lights flashing, siren wailing, people stumbling out in their nightclothes, children crying, dogs barking. The security guard jerked awake, fell off his chair, scrambled to his feet.
The fire brigade arrived in twelve minutes—a record for Mumbai. By then, flames were visible in three windows, but everyone was out. Everyone was safe. The news the next day would call it a miracle that no one died, that some good Samaritan had pulled the alarm just in time.
Thirty-seven people who should have died didn't.
Rajesh threw up in an alley on the way home, his body finally releasing the tension that had been building for weeks. He was saving lives based on notes from a stranger who ordered rice at 3 AM. He was either a hero or insane, and he wasn't sure which was worse.
---
"I need to see you," Rajesh said to the crack in the door. It had been three weeks since the fire, three weeks of regular deliveries, each with a note, each prediction coming true. He'd prevented a stabbing at a train station, warned an old woman about contaminated medicine at a local pharmacy, even called in an anonymous tip about a kidnapped child that led to her rescue.
He was exhausted. He'd lost weight. His mother kept asking if he was on drugs.
"I need to know who you are. What this is. I can't keep doing this without knowing."
The door opened wider than it ever had before. Not all the way, but enough for him to see inside. The flat was sparse, almost empty. A mattress on the floor. A laptop on a cardboard box that served as a desk. Empty rice containers stacked in a corner like a monument to isolation.
And her.
She was younger than he'd expected, maybe thirty-five, with the kind of beauty that had been worn down by fear and sleeplessness until only its ghost remained. She wore a man's shirt that hung on her frame like she'd shrunk inside it. Her eyes were the darkest brown he'd ever seen, pupils dilated in the dim light.
"My name is Meera," she said, and her voice was exactly what he'd imagined—soft, educated, tired. "Meera Chakraborty. And I'm sorry for dragging you into this."
"Into what?" Rajesh stepped inside, the plastic bag of rice forgotten in his hand. "How do you know these things?"
She laughed, bitter as black coffee. "Would you believe me if I told you?"
"I've been preventing disasters based on your notes for two months. I'll believe anything."
Meera moved to the laptop, gestured for him to come closer. On the screen were lines of code he didn't understand, numbers scrolling past like digital rain.
"I used to work for Nexus Pharmaceuticals," she said. "Data analysis. Looking for patterns in drug trials, side effects, that sort of thing. But I found something else. Something they were doing with the data they collected."
She pulled up another window. Maps of Mumbai, overlaid with red dots that pulsed like infected wounds.
"They're not just collecting medical data. They're collecting everything. Every app you use, every website you visit, every call you make. And they're using it to predict behavior. To predict events."
"That's... that's not possible."
"Isn't it?" She turned to look at him, and he saw the exhaustion carved into every line of her face. "You've seen it work. The algorithm—it knows. It calculates probability based on millions of data points. The man in the yellow shirt had searched for date rape drugs. The building that burned had a history of electrical complaints that were never fixed. The child who almost got hit—his mother had posted about him always running off."
"But then... why don't they prevent these things?"
Her laugh was darker this time. "Because tragedy is profitable. Insurance claims, medical bills, security contracts, pharmaceutical sales after trauma. They don't want to prevent disasters. They want to predict them, position themselves to profit from them."
Rajesh felt his legs go weak. He sat down hard on the floor. "And you're using their own system against them?"
"I stole it. The algorithm. Before they realized what I knew, I copied everything and ran. I've been hiding here for six months, using their own predictions to try to save people. But I can't leave. They're watching. The moment I step outside, they'll know."
"So you order food..."
"And hope someone like you will help." She sat down across from him, pulled her knees to her chest like a child. "The other delivery drivers stopped coming. One had a breakdown. I heard about that. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for that to happen."
"Pramod."
"Yes. He couldn't handle it. The knowledge. The responsibility. But you... you kept coming back. You kept helping."
They sat in silence for a moment, the weight of truth settling over them like monsoon rain.
"There's something else," Meera said finally. "The algorithm... it's gotten better. It's learning. And it's predicted something big."
She turned the laptop toward him. The screen showed a single line of text: *January 26. 11:47 AM. Bandra-Worli Sea Link. Structural failure. 400+ casualties.*
Rajesh stared at the date. That was in four days.
"We can warn people," he said. "Call the authorities—"
"With what proof? Anonymous tips about small crimes are one thing. But this? They'll trace it back. They'll find me. And then the prediction becomes certain."
"So what do we do?"
Meera looked at him with those dark, exhausted eyes. "I don't know. That's why I'm telling you. Because I can't carry this alone anymore."
---
Rajesh didn't sleep for two days. He went through the motions—deliveries, dinner with his mother, watching cricket with Vikram—but his mind was on the Sea Link. Four hundred people. Maybe more. Crushed by falling concrete and twisted metal, drowning in the Arabian Sea.
He researched structural failures, learned about resonance and metal fatigue and a dozen other ways a bridge could fail. He drove across the Sea Link six times, looking for signs of weakness, knowing he wouldn't recognize them if he saw them.
On January 25, the night before the predicted disaster, he got another order from Flat 1408. His hands shook as he accepted it.
This time, the door was wide open. Meera was sitting on the floor, laptop closed, a cup of tea cooling in her hands. She looked up when he entered, and he saw she'd been crying.
"I figured it out," she said. "How they'll do it."
"They? You mean it's not an accident?"
"It was never going to be an accident." She pulled up something on her laptop—emails, corporate communications, all stamped with the Nexus Pharmaceuticals logo. "They're going to cause it. A demonstration. To show certain interested parties what the algorithm can do. Predict a disaster so accurately because you're the one causing it."
Rajesh read the emails, his horror growing with each word. Technical specifications, explosive placements, timing mechanisms. All disguised as routine maintenance.
"We have to stop them," he said.
"How? Go to the police with stolen emails from a woman who doesn't officially exist anymore? They've erased me, Rajesh. My records, my identity, everything. As far as the world is concerned, Meera Chakraborty died six months ago."
"Then we stop it ourselves."
She looked at him like he'd suggested they fly to the moon. "How?"
He thought about all the lives he'd saved, all the disasters he'd prevented with nothing but good timing and desperation. "The same way we've been doing it. We're there when it happens, and we find a way."
"This isn't pulling a fire alarm or stopping a mugger. This is—"
"This is four hundred people who won't go home to their families if we don't try."
Meera was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood, walked to a closet, and pulled out a backpack. "I kept everything. Every piece of evidence, every communication I intercepted. If we're caught, if this goes wrong, at least someone will know the truth."
"You're coming with me?"
"I've been hiding in this flat for six months, ordering rice and salt because it's all I can stomach anymore, watching people die through a computer screen." She pulled on a jacket that was too big for her, probably bought before fear had eaten away at her body. "I'm done hiding."
---
January 26 dawned gray and humid, the kind of day that threatened rain but never delivered. Rajesh picked up Meera at 10 AM, watching her emerge from Moonlight Towers like a ghost learning to be solid again. She climbed onto his bike, her arms tight around his waist, and he could feel her trembling.
They reached the Sea Link at 10:45. Traffic was normal—which is to say, horrible. Cars packed bumper to bumper, the bridge groaning under the weight of Mumbai's ambition.
"Where?" Rajesh asked, scanning the bridge.
Meera pulled out her phone, checking something. "Maintenance access, pillar seven. That's where they'll trigger it."
They wove through traffic, the bike sliding between cars like a knife through butter. Pillar seven rose from the sea like a concrete giant, and yes, there was a maintenance van parked at its base. Two men in hard hats who looked too clean to be actual workers.
11:30.
"Seventeen minutes," Meera whispered.
They parked the bike. Rajesh's mind was racing. How do you stop two men from destroying a bridge? How do you save four hundred people without getting yourself killed?
"The police," Meera said suddenly. "Call them. Report a bomb threat. They'll have to investigate."
But when Rajesh pulled out his phone, there was no signal. He tried Meera's. Same result.
"They're jamming cell signals," she said, her face going pale. "Standard protocol for controlled demolition."
11:35.
One of the men was pulling something from the van. A laptop, military-grade, the kind that could survive a war.
"That's the trigger system," Meera said. "If we can get to that—"
"Stay here."
Rajesh didn't give her time to argue. He walked toward the men, trying to look official, confident, like he belonged there. His QuickBite jacket was still in his bag; he pulled it on. Sometimes the best disguise was to look like someone nobody paid attention to.
"Delivery!" he called out, holding up an empty bag. "Someone ordered lunch?"
The men looked at each other, confused. That moment of hesitation was all Rajesh needed. He lunged for the laptop, grabbed it, and threw it as hard as he could over the railing into the sea below.
For a second, nobody moved. Then one of the men pulled a gun.
The world slowed down the way it does when death introduces itself. Rajesh could see the man's finger tightening on the trigger, could calculate the trajectory of the bullet, could almost feel it tearing through him.
Then Meera was there, swinging something—a piece of rebar she'd found somewhere—and the gun went flying. The man screamed, clutching his hand. His partner was already running.
11:44.
"Three minutes," Meera gasped. "There might be a backup trigger."
They searched the van frantically, throwing out equipment, looking for another laptop, a phone, anything that could send a signal.
11:46.
Rajesh found it—a simple cell phone, duct-taped under the dashboard. He ripped it free, threw it to Meera. She looked at the screen, her fingers flying over it.
"Password protected. But if I can—" She did something, the screen flickered. "Got it. They used the default. Idiots."
11:47.
The phone showed a single app, a red button in the center of the screen. Armed.
Meera's finger hovered over it. One press, and four hundred people would die. Don't press it, and... nothing. Nothing would happen. The bridge would stand. People would go home.
She closed the app. Powered off the phone. Threw it into the sea to join the laptop.
They stood there, breathing hard, watching the traffic continue to flow across the bridge. Families in cars, businessmen on motorcycles, a school bus full of children. All of them oblivious to how close they'd come.
"We did it," Rajesh said, hardly believing it.
"We stopped this one," Meera corrected. "But they'll try again. Different target, different method. The algorithm doesn't stop."
Police sirens in the distance, getting closer. Someone must have seen the altercation, called it in.
"You should go," Rajesh said. "I'll handle the police."
"And say what?"
He thought about it. What could he say that anyone would believe? That he'd stopped a corporate conspiracy to destroy a bridge based on predictions from a computer algorithm? They'd lock him up.
"Nothing," he decided. "I'll say nothing. Just a fight over a parking spot."
Meera pulled the backpack off her shoulders, handed it to him. "The evidence. Everything's in there. Encrypted, but the password is written inside the front pocket. Find someone who will believe you. Someone with power."
"What about you?"
She looked out at the sea, at the city sprawling beyond the bridge. "I've been dead for six months. Maybe it's time to come back to life. But first, I need to disappear properly. Really disappear, where even their algorithm can't find me."
A bus pulled up to the nearby stop. She moved toward it, then turned back.
"Thank you," she said. "For believing the notes. For saving all those people. For being the kind of person who delivers rice at 3 AM to strange apartments."
"Will I see you again?"
She smiled, the first real smile he'd seen from her. "Check your phone. 3 AM. You'll know it's me if the order is for rice and salt."
The bus pulled away, taking her with it. Rajesh stood on the bridge, holding a backpack full of evidence of crimes that hadn't happened, watching the space where she'd been.
---
The police came, asked questions, found nothing. The men in hard hats had vanished. The van was registered to a company that didn't exist. Rajesh stuck to his story—an argument, nothing more. They let him go with a warning about fighting in public.
That night, he sat with his mother, watching her make chapati, the familiar rhythm of her hands soothing something deep in his chest.
"You look different," she said. "Lighter. Like you've put down something heavy."
"Maybe I have."
"This job, it's not forever, beta. You have your degree. You could try again, apply to companies—"
"I know, Ma. But for now, this is what I need to do."
She nodded, understanding without understanding, the way mothers do.
His phone buzzed. 3 AM delivery. His heart jumped, but when he checked, it was just a regular order. Biryani to an IT park where someone was pulling an all-nighter.
Life went on. He delivered food. He saved the occasional life when he could—pulling a drunk man back from a train platform edge, calling an ambulance for an old woman who'd fallen, small acts that didn't require prophetic notes. The backpack sat in his closet, waiting for the right moment, the right person to believe.
Three months later, a story broke in the international press. A whistleblower had released documents about Nexus Pharmaceuticals and their illegal data collection, their manipulation of predictive algorithms, their plans to manufacture disasters for profit. The company's stock crashed. Executives were arrested. The story mentioned an anonymous source who'd provided crucial evidence.
Rajesh read the news on his phone while waiting for an order, smiled, and deleted the encrypted messaging app he'd used to contact the journalist.
That night, at exactly 3 AM, his phone pinged. Order from a new customer, location in Pune, three hours away. The order: plain rice, extra salt, and a note in the special instructions field: "Thank you for everything. The future is unpredictable now. Isn't that wonderful? - M"
He accepted the order, even though he'd never make it in time, even though the address probably didn't exist. Sometimes you delivered food. Sometimes you delivered hope. And sometimes, just sometimes, you delivered people from futures that should never come to pass.
Rajesh started his bike, the engine coughing its familiar complaint, and rode into the Mumbai night. The city sprawled around him, four hundred souls still breathing on the Sea Link, thirty-seven families still whole in the New Paradise Complex, a teenage girl still alive on Marine Drive. Each life a thread in the vast tapestry of the city, each one precious, each one worth a late-night delivery.
The algorithm had been wrong about one thing: the future wasn't predictable if you had people willing to change it. And in a city of twenty million souls, there would always be someone willing to deliver rice at 3 AM, willing to believe impossible things, willing to stand between disaster and the people they'd never meet.
The bike's headlight cut through the darkness, and Rajesh drove on, no longer delivering to Flat 1408, but carrying its message forward anyway: Sometimes the most powerful thing you could do was show up at the right place, at the right time, with nothing but rice and salt and the determination to make tomorrow different from what the machines predicted.
In Mumbai, city of dreams and nightmares, that was enough. It had to be.